Teaching a five-hour course load each week may seem minimal when you look at classroom hours alone. However, the reality is that this contact time often expands considerably once you factor in lesson preparation, grading, and student support. For instance, if you spend two hours preparing each hour of class, you’ve already jumped to ten additional hours—just for planning. Add in time for grading essays or projects, responding to student emails, and handling administrative tasks like online portals or accommodations, and your overall teaching-related time can quickly approach or exceed 25 hours per week.
This intensive commitment can be especially challenging for professors aiming to maintain high-quality research, which thrives on deep, uninterrupted focus. Gathering or analyzing data, reviewing literature, writing manuscripts, and revising drafts in response to peer feedback all require sustained periods of concentration. Constantly jumping between these research activities and the granular demands of teaching—such as responding to forum posts or grading short quizzes—can disrupt your mental flow and slow your progress toward publication.
Yet, it remains possible to achieve high-quality research alongside a five-hour teaching schedule if you plan strategically. One helpful approach is to block out specific times for research and treat them with the same respect as your scheduled class hours. During these “research blocks,” consider disabling email notifications or turning off your phone to preserve your focus. For example, many professors find it productive to reserve entire mornings or specific days—like setting aside Wednesdays and Fridays—solely for research and writing. Another tactic is to integrate your teaching with your scholarly work. If you’re a marketing professor, for instance, you might design student projects around real-time market analysis. Students gain hands-on experience, and their findings could spark ideas for your own papers or research collaborations.
Finally, don’t underestimate the value of leveraging technology and team support to lighten the teaching load. Automated grading tools or teaching assistants can save time that can be redirected toward research tasks. By combining strategic scheduling, creating synergy between teaching topics and research interests, and enlisting support where possible, one can excel in the classroom while preserving enough mental space to produce rigorous, high-impact scholarship. This is why it’s so vital to have an environment that respects and protects capacity for deep work.
Institutions can help by allowing sufficient time blocks for research, providing teaching or administrative support, and encouraging faculty to set healthy boundaries in their schedules. Just as importantly, a supportive environment extends to peers and department leadership who understand the creative demands of scholarship, acknowledge the mental energy required for high-quality teaching, and foster a culture where meaningful breaks, collaboration, and flexibility are not just allowed but celebrated. By valuing and safeguarding the mental bandwidth of researchers and educators, universities enable them to produce impactful, innovative work while simultaneously delivering enriching academic experiences to their students.
This text is based on a conversation with the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT o1, January 25, 2025
Comment: The optimist text above offers remedies for research and teaching five-hours per week in-class, assuming service is trivial, technology and support is perfect. Often we have to allocate some tolerance around these as well. For instance, quite many professors assume no scoring errors and availability of teaching assistants dedicated for their courses only, which is usually not that way. Hence, achieving the much needed quality in research and university education becomes a real problem for societies around the world.